Components of a gas turbine engine that are exposed to hot combustion gases are being operated closer to their design limits as gas turbine engine designs continue to increase the operating temperatures of the combustion gases. Operating closer to the design limit tends to reduce a life-span of the component when compared to a lifespan when operated in a cooler environment. Once a component reaches the end of its lifespan it must be replaced, and this necessitates a shutdown of the gas turbine engine. Such shut downs are expensive and time consuming. Without any means of determining how much of the component's lifespan may be left, component replacement often takes the form of preventative maintenance. As a result, a component may be removed prior to the end of its life. This is considered a better alternative to unintentionally leaving a component in operation beyond the end of its lifespan and risking a catastrophic failure of the component. Concurrently, there exists a desire to monitor the operating environment within the gas turbine engine to optimize turbine operation according to real time conditions.
Smart components have been developed in response to the above needs. Smart components may include sensors built into the component itself, where the sensors gather information about the operating environment and transmit that information outside of the operating environment. That information may be used to enable condition based maintenance instead of preventative maintenance, and to optimize turbine operation as desired.
Conventional smart component installation practice involves mounting sensors to the components, running lead wires to routers, and bringing large bundles of lead wires out of the turbine and over long distances to a monitoring station. The instrumentation process is slow, labor intensive, expensive, unreliable, and requires modification of many of the components in order to allow for the inclusion of all the lead wires.